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The first blue-laser movies were rushed to market, and many of them look it. Most are older, and some have been remastered from less-than-perfect source material, resulting in high-resolution discs that reveal grain and film defects in stunning detail. Because professional-quality commercial H.264/AVC codecs aren't yet available, most HD DVD authors used the VC-1 codec (developed by key HD DVD backer Microsoft) to compress content. Blu-ray authors chose a popular MPEG-2 HD encoder that Blu-ray evangelist Sony made.

Many industry insiders feel that MPEG is one reason why so many Blu-ray titles have disappointing picture quality. The newer, more efficient VC-1 and H.264 codecs have little problem compressing a movie, menus, and special features onto a dual-layer 30GB HD DVD disc. But MPEG isn't optimized for the lower bit rates necessary to shoehorn that content into a 25GB single-layer Blu-ray disc. We expect 50GB dual-layer replicated Blu-ray discs to improve Blu-ray picture quality greatly over the next six months. The issue may become moot next year as production-quality H.264/AVC codec tools become available to authors. Both specs support those codecs, yet as we go to press, no movies are using them.

Another weakness of the first batch of blue-laser movies is their lack of advanced functionality. The Blu-ray and HD DVD formats specify sophisticated authoring environments that let developers implement advanced features such as multiple-video-stream playback and interactive links to Internet content. Few authors, however, have had the time to explore fully the capabilities of HD DVD's XML-based iHD or Blu-ray's Java-based BD-J authoring tools. This will likely change over the next few years, and as it does, blue-laser titles will offer a far more interactive entertainment experience than they do today.

Audio is yet another area where the first titles fall short. Although both formats promise 7.1-channel sound and specify a variety of next-generation multichannel Dolby and DTS codecs, no release to date has implemented all these options. Current HD DVD titles provide 5.1 soundtracks in Dolby Digital Plus and plain old DVD-class Dolby Digital formats, while Blu-ray discs let you choose between Dolby Digital and great-sounding 5.1-channel uncompressed PCM audio. This isn't a crucial issue right now, since no receivers yet offer Dolby Digital Plus or DTS-HD decoding, and 7.1-channel sound systems are still uncommon outside of the gaming community. But these new standards may become de rigueur for videophiles over the next few years. If that happens, new titles will be expected to support all the major audio codecs in Blu-ray and HD DVD.

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